The revival of interest in Louis MacNeice's work in the last fifteen years or so has not extended to any discussion of his interest in the poetry of Dante. Dante is, however, present both near the beginning and at the end of MacNeice's literary biography: at the time of his death he was starting to arrange a sequence of translations from the Inferno for radio broadcast, and in The Strings Are False he tells how he sought a refuge in books in his early years at Marlborough, being ‘particularly fond of a large edition of Dante with illustrations by Gustave Doré.¹ It is true that he then talks more about his interest in Doré than in Dante, and in an account of his reading tastes published in The Times in 1961 he does indeed set limits on this latter interest:

another epic work which I home towards and linger in is Dante's Inferno (read with the Temple Classics crib) but not the rest of the Divine Comedy; neither Purgatory nor Paradise is rich enough in story.²

When MacNeice refers to Dante in his own poetry and prose it generally is to the Inferno, and one can admit at the outset that in MacNeice we have no such Dantesque immersion as we find in Pound, Eliot, Joyce and the rest. MacNeice's characteristic scepticism about authority, be it political or literary, partly explains why Dante could not function for him as the authority-figure he represented for several of the modernists, particularly Eliot. And this also perhaps explains why his relationship with Dante has received so little critical attention.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to discount this relationship, given that in one poem, Autumn Sequel, published in 1954, MacNeice gives us what is arguably the most sustained exercise in Dantesque form in modern English: a poem of twenty-six ‘cantos’ in endecasyllabic terza rima, each canto moreover corresponding in length with Dante's, at about 140-160 lines.³ Given the exemplary nature of MacNeice's use of the terza rima form, which is cleverly varied and fluently contrived throughout the poem, it is remarkable that Autumn Sequel has received so little attention, not only from students of English metrical traditions but from MacNeice's own commentators. As far as the former are concerned, discussion of English terza rima tends to centre on ‘The Triumph of Life’, ‘The Prophecy of Dante’ and one or two other over-quoted examples; and for the latter, Autumn Sequel has always fallen under the shadow of its predecessor Autumn Journal, published in 1939.

Seen precisely as a mere sequel to an earlier success, a doomed attempt ‘to recapture the old magic’ in Edna Longley's phrase, the later poem is there to ‘prove’ that, ‘artistically speaking, you can never go back’, as the same critic puts it.⁴ In countering Longley's cursory dismissal, I shall argue that Autumn Sequel has an agenda constituted not simply through ‘going back’ to the Journal, an agenda bound up with the work's dialogue with Dante: the earlier poem had solely numbered parts (rather than self-proclaimed ‘cantos’), was half as long and did not adopt terza rima.⁵ The bracing drama of Autumn Journal, informed as it is by Spain, Munich, imminent catastrophe and the self's attempt to ‘build the falling castle’ (ii, p. 104) in the face of this, is replaced in the later poem by a sense of an undramatic post-war political hiatus in which a similar quest defines itself not against ‘Hitler [yelling] on the wireless’ (vii, p. 113) but against ‘the Parrot … loose on the world’ whose caw represents a sardonic mockery of all human striving (i, p. 331); the former situation, as Autumn Journal itself confesses, results in ‘all our trivial daily acts [being] altered / Into heroic or romantic make-believe’ (xvii, p. 134). The major public events of the later poem are the Coronation and the scaling of Everest, the latter a declaration against ‘parrot speak’, but there is no doubt that the lessening in significance of the poem's historical context has weighed over-much with critics who can hear little in it beyond feeble echoes of its predecessor. The later poem is confessedly more routine-bound, with the narrator securely settled in his BBC job and the round of pubbing, visiting friends and travelling round Britain making radio documentaries that goes with it, against a backdrop of ‘daily news’ in which ‘there is not so much to note’ (x, p. 370). The quest-motif that runs through the poem includes the quest to make poetry itself out of this repetitive daily round, an enterprise that arguably should elicit no less admiration than that in Autumn Journal, which self-confessedly draws on the ready-made drama of the historical situation. The historical context apart, the two poems share some very similar positions, including a gospel of individualism and the individual ‘light’ that would resist the encroachment of mass political affiliation (compare the lines on the ‘spendthrift’ fire in Autumn Journal xxi, p. 144 with the later poem's metaphor of the individual ‘taper’ in xiii, p. 385) and the rhetorical proclamation of ‘life’ itself, as ‘the only thing worth living’ (Autumn Journal, xxi, p. 145; compare the ‘life is holy’ conclusion to the Sequel, xxvi, p. 439). In ways we shall explore below, however, the Sequel is a critique of the earlier poem's expression of these positions.

If the form of Autumn Sequel is manifestly Dantesque, the narrative framework is more ambiguously so. A ‘pub crawl to Paradise’, the Times reviewer labelled it after hearing the first radio excerpt broadcast in June 1954, but added (in distinction to most of MacNeice's recent critics) ‘of the vitality of this long work in terza rima there can be no doubt.’⁶ Commentators have indeed picked up on the idea of Autumn Sequel restaging (with modifications) Dante's journey: thus Jon Stallworthy suggests that ‘MacNeice found himself in the middle of the journey of his life in a dark wood where the straight way was lost’ and that a desire to revisit ‘his dead friends in the Underworld’ explains the influence of the Commedia.⁷ The presence of friends, both dead and alive, is indeed a major departure from the matter of Autumn Journal; the later poem describes a series of meetings with such friends, or records them in a number of portraits, and the Commedia obviously suggested itself to MacNeice as a way of structuring such a series. When The Times reviewed the published book of Autumn Sequel later in 1954, there are again notes of praise—it is a ‘very considerable poem’, and the terza rima is ‘well chosen’—but some doubts about what is seen as the partial correlation with Dante: ‘Purgatorio without either Inferno or Paradiso is a lonely and unsatisfactory place’.⁸ In assembling these critical comments, past and present, we can detect uncertainty as to the progression of the poem, in comparison with Dante's model; which of the cantiche should it be linked with, more particularly at the start and the finish? Certainly, if the poem is a ‘pub crawl to Paradise’ it shows no final arrival there: the very end of the poem—

… I wait unmoving, moving by degrees
Towards home where waits one person which is you
Who takes the ancient view that life is holy.
Meanwhile, to bring me nearer to that view,
This train approaches London. Quickly. Slowly.

(xxvi, p. 439)

—records the consummation of home, love and union, but the application of the brakes in the final word leaves the poem short of this consummation. This embodies what is MacNeice's typical outlook. In his best-known radio-play The Dark Tower (1947), there is no final triumph for Roland over the Dragon (as there is not in Browning's poem); heroism is represented by the quest itself. As Roland's tutor says, ‘a man lives on a sliding staircase— / … to be a man / He has to climb against it … / … he will not reach / The top—if there is a top—and when he dies / He will slump and go down regardless. All the same / While he lives he must climb’.⁹ In Autumn Sequel, the quest-motif is emphasized in the middle cantos, xiv-xvi, where a ‘young man’ protagonist, dissociated from the narrator, enters a ‘black labyrinth’ (xv, p. 390) representing life's confusions and temptations that owes some details to Dante; thus he has to ‘pick … his steps among the mummied heads’ (xiv, p. 389) (compare Dante's threading his way through Cocytus in Inferno 32), and finally ‘regain[s] the sky / And the give and take of humanity’ (xvi, p. 395) in a moment that recalls the Inferno's final line.

The major temptation overcome in these cantos is that offered by absolutist voices, political or religious, proclaiming ‘I am the only Way’ (xv, p. 393), or the temptation to succumb to a materialist-chemical conception of human life that would deny the freedom of the will (xvi, p. 394). The former struggle echoes the insistence in Autumn Journal on the human ‘birthright’ of ‘moral choice’ standing out against ‘taking orders / Out of a square box from a mad voice’ (xviii, p. 139), while the assertion of the latter freedom recalls the teaching of the middle cantos of the Purgatorio on the divine gift of the ‘libero voler’ in the face of astral determinism (16, ll. 65-84). MacNeice's rejection of absolutism, his protagonist's resurfacing into ‘the give and take of humanity’, signals again that the poem's pursuit is not towards some authoritative Dantesque ‘truth’ or vision but rather away from such finalization; the quizzing of Dante's tribute to Aristotle in Inferno 4, l. 131 in MacNeice's phrase in canto xii, ‘the Master / Of those who know so well that they do not know’ (p. 379) encapsulates this divergence (the phrase is a reworking of a similar dismissal at the beginning of section xi of Autumn Journal (p. 121)). A strong sense of existence as process rather than arrival, and of the medium of existence as contingency and contradiction, informs Autumn Sequel, as indeed it does all of MacNeice's poetry: ‘… I will not give you any idol or idea, creed or king, / I give you the incidental things which pass / Outward through space exactly as each was’ as the early poem “Train to Dublin” puts it (p. 28). The ‘dark wood’ motif for the poem suggested by Stallworthy above is in fact more obvious at its conclusion than its beginning, with the final lines presenting the ‘wood which none distinctly sees / Or fully finds his way in’ as an ever-present condition (xxvi, p. 439). The train journey is one of MacNeice's favourite venues for this prioritizing of the ongoing and its uncertainties, and as we have seen, also features at the end of Autumn Sequel; the journal, or journal-sequel, form is its most suitable literary equivalent. In this sense, the journal form is rather at odds with the terza rima construction which, by gesturing so markedly towards Dante, might promise a regular progression to some final totalizing understanding. However, not only do we not have a clear sequence from cantica to cantica, as in Dante, we also get a strongly counter-Dantesque scepticism with regard to authority and resolution, though the sense of moving towards, if not arriving at, consummation is more apparent in Autumn Sequel than in the Journal; in the later poem the journal form is coupled more explicitly with the theme of journey, resulting in a relationship with the Commedia that is both congruent and, in the ways described above, oppositional.

In two pieces MacNeice contributed to the ‘Notes on the Way’ series (the title seems peculiarly MacNeicean) featured by the magazine Time & Tide in 1952, he talks about the modern intellectual's longing for ‘systems’, noting that at present there is a ‘marked swing back towards the Middle Ages’. While MacNeice insists on rejecting such temptations, he notes the danger of ‘accidie’ if nothing positive is found to replace such ‘day-dreams’.¹⁰ What he then offers as a palliative to the universal ‘pain in the landscape’ is the commitment to personal relationships on the one hand and, for the artist, to ‘craftsmanship’ on the other: ‘the artist is primarily a “maker”—and this is what saves him from accidie’. Attending to one's own ‘making’, moreover, has a wider bearing:

to ‘cultivate one's garden’ is a cliché that today sounds almost defeatist but it is not defeatist—or escapist—if one thinks of and treats one's garden as part of the landscape—and remembers that pain in the landscape which, however minutely, it may mitigate.

(pp. 182-3)

Autumn Sequel, written a year later, then goes on to prioritize ‘craftsmanship’ and personal friendships, at the same time rebuffing the systematic Middle Ages via the oppositional aspects of the engagement with Dante touched on above. Indeed, the decision to write a poem in ‘cantos’ that does this may be a targeting of Pound's Cantos in particular, with their declared reliance on a neo-Dantesque progression.¹¹

Many of the narrator's friends featured in the poem are themselves cultivating their gardens, figuratively and literally, as in the case of E. R. Dodds, classicist and editor of MacNeice, who figures under the pseudonym of Boyce in Cantos vii and xiii, and who, ‘both classical scholar and gardener, / Alike in shelves and plots can plant a Yea / Against that obstinate No …’ (vii, p. 359). This ‘yea’ is employed in a very general way throughout the poem as an assertion of ‘life’, truth and the humane values against the ‘No’ of (generalized) denial, and against ‘the great No-God’ who winces in the face of people like Boyce (vii, p. 359)—in its subtitle Autumn Sequel indeed declares itself ‘a Rhetorical Poem’.¹² As the poem moves in time from autumn towards Christmas, the assertive mode becomes more prominent: thus Canto xxiv ends on an assent to the seasonal celebrations: ‘while I, brought up to scoff rather than bless / And to say No, unless the facts require / A neutral verdict, for this once say Yes’ (p. 431). The sardonic note of self-appraisal here picks up on the debate between detachment and commitment that is omnipresent in MacNeice's work and that often has resort to Dante's portrayal of the ‘ignavi’ of Inferno 3. It is a debate central to Autumn Journal, and one that the Sequel resumes.

To say you ‘cannot choose’ as an individual to contribute to necessary political change because of powerlessness in the face of external ‘conditions’ is ‘to make the Great Refusal’, notes MacNeice in a reference to Inferno 3, l. 60 in an unfinished essay written in the early 1940s (MacNeice (1990), p. 141). At times, however, Autumn Journal is rather less sanguine about the exercise of this freedom:

                    the individual, powerless, has to exert the
          Powers of will and choice
And choose between enormous evils, either
          Of which depends on somebody else's voice.

(v, p. 109)

Given that ‘we [cannot] hide our heads in the sands’ at this ‘zero hour’ (v, p. 110) then the proper exercise of choice becomes the deliberate act of not choosing between these ‘enormous evils’, a kind of vigilant and constantly self-inspecting detachment that is not to be confused with the self-serving neutrality of the souls in Inferno 3: not that is the ‘negative’ safety the Journal later refers to but the state of remaining ‘free on the edge of a razor’ (xxiii, p. 149). However, it is ‘no wonder’ at the present time that

                    many would renounce their birthright,
          The responsibility of moral choice,
And sit with a mess of pottage taking orders
          Out of a square box from a mad voice—
Lies on the air endlessly repeated …

(xviii, p. 139)

This stance of a razor's-edge detachment is nevertheless identified more negatively at times, for instance in comparison with the Spanish Republicans of Part xxiii, ‘the stubborn heirs of freedom’ whose

                    matter-of-fact faith and courage shame
          Our niggling equivocations—
We who play for safety,
          A safety only in name.

(p. 150)

At times MacNeice's sympathy with commitment per se overrides the cautionary vigilance prescribed elsewhere, as in the statement that it is ‘very much better / To act for good and bad than have no sins / And take no action either’ (xix, p. 141). This position, which seems to owe something to Eliot's proposal in the ‘Baudelaire’ essay of 1930 that ‘it is better … to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist’ is also underwritten as in Eliot by Dante's picture of the ‘ignavi’ who ‘mai non fur vivi’ (‘were never alive’) (Inferno 3, l. 64).¹³ Here, however, it is significant that MacNeice is talking about commitment in the realm of personal relationships rather than of politics, just as Part iv of the Journal, which is again directed to the former lover who is the poem's main addressee, rehearses the lesson taught by that lover that ‘generous feeling [is] more important / Than the mere deliberating what to do’: ‘even your lies were able to assert / Integrity of purpose’ (p. 108). Questionable and even ‘sinful’ allegiances are countenanced in the poem in the personal rather than public realm then (‘lies’ from a lover might have integrity but not those out of a ‘box’), and Inferno 3 becomes a privatized allegory relating to the balance between head and heart within the individual. When the phrase ‘the great refusal’ itself occurs in Autumn Journal it refers not to the abrogation of the powers of political choice but to the refusal of life itself in the act of suicide, a caution against dousing the individual ‘fire’ again addressed to the poet's former lover (xxi, p. 145).

The model of the fiery, passionate yet politically circumspect individual is offered in Autumn Journal as an intervention in the deepening historical gloom, but it is a model constantly scrutinized, as noted above, in the temptations to slip into public abdication that beset it; ‘we only want to cultivate our garden’, Part xx notes, but the turbulence of the times won't allow this (p. 142). Autumn Sequel, as we have seen, expresses far less doubt about the value of garden-cultivation, both literal and metaphorical, and it does this, one might say, because its canvassing of individualism is far more assured and developed. In Autumn Journal, while there is a good deal of talk about the importance of the individual ‘light’ or ‘voice’—

                    there are still the seeds of energy and choice
          Still alive even if forbidden, hidden,
And while a man has voice
          He may recover music

(xviii, p. 139)

—there are very few individuals or ‘voices’ actually featured in the poem beyond the narrator himself and his former lover. As MacNeice noted in a statement of the poem's intent sent to his publisher, ‘different parts of myself’ are ‘given their say in turn’ (quoted in Stallworthy (1995), p. 233). This sense of introspection and self-reporting may be an element in the dismissal of the earlier poem in the opening canto of the Sequel, which ‘deplore[s] each megrim and moan I scrawled on the sky / In my hand of unformed smoke those fifteen years / A-going, a-going, ago’ and which talks of the Journal as ‘indulging my own heart's paralysis’ (i, pp. 331, 334). In the Sequel the nihilism of the Parrot's caw is to be ‘gagged’ with a plurality of ‘human voices’, and the poet's friends featured throughout the poem are assembled into a ‘choir’ where each can ‘tell what music, pipe what truth he can’ in order to ‘give the lie to nostrum-peddling cliques’ (i, p. 332). The ‘prefatory note’ to the poem also records the ‘parody echoes’ of the work of some of MacNeice's contemporaries to be found there, as well as, on occasion, direct quotations from their work. If the use of Dantesque ‘cantos’ suggested to MacNeice a way of organizing this choir of voices, one has to say that Autumn Sequel as a whole hardly resonates with the polyvocality that Bakhtin, for example, identified in the Commedia.¹⁴ Though a host of friends are presented and their conversation reported, a direct representation of other voices is rarely attempted after the speech by Gavin that opens Canto ii. Monologue remains the dominant discourse of Autumn Sequel, and there is no Virgil-figure present to interact with the narrator.

The ‘niggling equivocations’ castigated in Autumn Journal are also highlighted in the Sequel: the final line of the very first canto, ‘But, on the other hand, there is another hand’ (p. 335), represents a ‘balance’ both upheld and ironized in the poem, and on occasion broken away from, as in the lines already quoted above where the poet, normally ready ‘to say No, unless the facts require / A neutral verdict, for this once say[s] Yes’ (xxiv, p. 431). Of all Dante's phrases, ‘il gran rifiuto’ (Inferno 3, l. 60) seems to have had the most resonance for MacNeice; it occurs at other points in his work over and above those already mentioned (MacNeice (1987), p. 5; (1990), p. 76) and represents various examples of personal and political abdication and neutrality; the late poem “Il piccolo Rifiuto” also diagnoses a ‘God damn you, leave me alone rejection of a world that offers opportunity and fulfilment though at the cost of emotional risk (pp. 478-9).

If the dangers of neutrality are mediated for MacNeice through Dante, the commitment that would challenge such neutrality in Autumn Sequel does not, as we have seen, embrace any very recognizable Dantesque position. The ‘Yes-word’ of rhetorical assertion comes to MacNeice, I would argue, from the final chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, though Autumn Sequel's narrator is no Molly Bloom and the Christmas ‘yes’ and rite of homecoming that conclude the poem stop short of climax, as I have suggested above.¹⁵ The ‘Yes’ at the end of Canto xxiv is ‘for this once’, an uncertain and temporary stasis, and this might affirm that sense of the poem as a Purgatorio without its Paradiso, as The Times reviewer noted. Samuel Beckett distinguished between Dante's work and Joyce's in comparing the latter to a Purgatory that ‘excludes culmination’ in its ‘absolute absence of the Absolute’, but the evident caution of Autumn Sequel and its hesitancy over culmination becomes more apparent than that in Ulysses in a comparison of the endings of the two works.¹⁶ MacNeice's poem remains in the Ulyssean voice throughout, that of the voyager; it doesn't adopt the voice of Penelope to utter what Joyce noted was ‘the female word yes’.¹⁷

In his piece for The Times on ‘Pleasure in Reading’, MacNeice noted, after commenting on his preference for the Inferno, ‘as for Homer, give me the Odyssey every time as against the Iliad’ (MacNeice (1987), p. 232). The final piece printed in the Collected Poems, entitled “Thalassa” (dating from c. 1963) concludes:

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

(p. 546)

As Stallworthy comments (p. 470), ‘the speaker might be [Tennyson's] Ulysses’, but Dante's Ulysses would serve just as well. And though the voyager of Autumn Journal is heading for wife and home at Christmas at the end of the poem, what I've suggested as the provisionality of this gesture, its unDantesque resistance to finalization, is finally emphasized by the seemingly random number of cantos MacNeice has chosen to write in. A Rhetorical Poem in XXVI Cantos, to give the full subtitle of Autumn Sequel, thus aligns itself not with Dante's complete and Christocentric number 33, but with what we might call the Ulyssean number 26; a number that, mapped onto Dante's first two cantiche, would end the voyage with that master rhetorician Ulysses, or with a Purgatorio not only bereft of its Paradiso but even its paradiso terrestre. A major difference between Autumn Journal and the Sequel for MacNeice is the presence of structure and ‘story’ in the later poem, which in its opening canto accosts the Journal in its attempt to present a ‘slice of life’ when ‘there is no such thing’ (p. 331). Although the Sequel is committed to incorporating everydayness, this is cut across by the Dantesque modes of ‘fixing’ portraits of friends within individual cantos and by a stronger sense of the journey as governing theme, a sense that intensifies in the second half of the poem as Christmas becomes its destination and the frequently-referred-to journey of the Magi a parallel to the narrator's own (Christmas features to some extent as a terminus in Autumn Journal but there is far more sense at the conclusion of standing on the uncertain brink of the New Year). This is, however, a journey not quite completed, as we have seen, suggesting that the climax of Autumn Sequel remains true to the paramount MacNeicean position that would constantly balance the giving with the holding back.

Notes

1. See Coulton (1980), p. 193; MacNeice (1965), p. 81. The broadcast translations, by different hands, were published by the BBC in 1966 as Dante's Inferno: With Translations Broadcast in the BBC Third Programme.

2. ‘Pleasure in Reading: Woods to Get Lost In’, in MacNeice (1987), p. 232.

3. All references to MacNeice's poetry are to MacNeice (1966).

4. Longley (1988), p. 115.

5. The dismissal of Autumn Sequel is practically universal amongst MacNeice's critics, though one can except Peter McDonald: see his discussion of the poem in McDonald (1991), pp. 147-53.

6. ‘Mr Louis MacNeice's Autumn Sequel’, The Times, 5 July 1954, p. 11. Excerpts from the poem (amounting to about two-thirds of it) were broadcast on the Third Programme between 28 June and 1 August 1954.

7. Stallworthy (1995), pp. 400-1; see also Coulton (1980), p. 135.

8. ‘Mr MacNeice's New Verse’, The Times, 20 November 1954, p. 8.

9. MacNeice (1947), p. 37.

10. MacNeice (1990), pp. 178-9.

11. Compare Pound's ‘for forty years I have schooled myself … to write an epic poem which begins “In the Dark Forest” crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light, and “fra i maestri di color che sanno”’ (‘An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States’, 1944, first English translation 1950, in Pound (1973), p. 137).

12. The subtitle of the original edition (MacNeice, 1954) was omitted when the poem appeared in the 1966 Collected Poems.

13. T. S. Eliot, ‘Baudelaire’, in Eliot (1951), p. 427. Eliot's clearest depiction of those who ‘do nothing’ in relation to Dante's ‘ignavi’ is of course offered in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925).

14. Bakhtin (1984), pp. 26-7, 30-1.

15. See MacNeice's comment in a review of books relating to Joyce on the ‘very interesting explanation’ Joyce himself gave of the position of the word ‘yes’ in the final chapter of Ulysses in MacNeice (1987), p. 215.

16. ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce’, in Beckett et al. (1929), pp. 21-2.

17. See Joyce's letter to Frank Budgen of 16 August 1921 in Joyce (1975), p. 285.

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